I’m not good at precise, coherent argument. But plays are suited to incoherent argument, put into the mouths of fallible people.
ALAN BENNETTCulminating with a man in a white coat saying to one kindly, “And now can you tell me the name of the Prime Minister?”
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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You always know when you’re going to arrive. If you go by car, you don’t. Apart from anything else, I prefer cycling. It puts you in a good mood, I find.
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But most men regard their life as a poem that women threaten.
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His writing is that of someone whose whole life was spent in apartments, with lifts, stairwells, muffled voices behind closed doors, and sounds through walls.
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Illogically, I tend to assume that if you ( Philip Larkin) dream of caning schoolgirls bottoms, it disqualifies you from dismissing half the nation as work-shy.
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The best moments in reading are when you come across something – a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things – which you had thought special and particular to you.
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Why do we not care to acknowledge them? The cattle, the body count.
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I bet Tom Stoppard doesn’t have to do this’ or There is no doubt David Hare would have deputed this to an underling.’
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Once I start a book I finish it. That was the way one was brought up.
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To play Trivial Pursuit with a life like mine could be said to be a form of homeopathy.
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That’s a bit like asking a man crawling across the Sahara whether he would prefer Perrier or Malvern water.
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We have fish and chips, which W. and I fetch from the shop in Settle market-place.
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Life is generally something that happens elsewhere.
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Of course they’re out of date. Standards are always out of date. That is what makes them standards.
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I was an only child. I lost both my parents. By the time I was twenty I was bald. I’m homosexual.
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We were put to Dickens as children but it never quite took. That unremitting humanity soon had me cheesed off.
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At eighty things do not occur; they recur.
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It’s the one species I wouldn’t mind seeing vanish from the face of the earth.
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A book, as it were, closes the book.
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Memories are not shackles, Franklin, they are garlands.
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The masters had no idea what was expected of you in the scholarship exam, so you just had to busk it really.
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Mark my words, when a society has to resort to the lavatory for its humour, the writing is on the wall.
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In the way of circumstances and background to transcend I had everything an artist could possibly want. It was practically a blueprint.
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Imagine that. Per person. This means that if the time scale is diminished in proportion to that of space it would be quite possible for the whole story of Greece and Rome to be played out between farts.
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I wish they were like the White Rhinosix of them left in the Serengeti National Park, and all males.
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I don’t talk very well. With writing, you’ve time to get it right. Also I’ve found the more I talk the less I write, and if I didn’t write no one would want me to talk anyway.
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At the drabber moments of my life (swilling some excrement from the steps, for instance, or rooting with a bent coat-hanger down a blocked sink) thoughts occur like.
ALAN BENNETT